Photos in ‘The Black Civil War Soldier’ by Deborah Willis remember a quest for freedom

At a time when some monuments are falling, Deborah Willis is considering the statues that still haven’t been built.

The venerable artist, curator, and researcher of photographic history says her archival work for her new book, The Black Civil War Soldier: A Visual History of Conflict and Citizenship, has made her see monuments differently than some folks.

“People were angry with me, thinking that ‘Oh, [monuments] should be torn down.’ I’m saying ‘No, we need more,’” Willis says. A monument to Alexander Herritage Newton, to name one.

A photograph of Newton is one of many slices of history Willis revives in the book. He was in his early 20s when the Civil War broke out, and at that point, it was illegal for Black men to enlist in the Union army. Newton found Brooklyn’s 13th Regiment and joined it regardless, later continuing his service with the 29th Connecticut Infantry.

A son of the South who’d been born free to a free mother and an enslaved father, Newton wrote letters to Black newspapers and eventually his own autobiography. “The way that he describes his experiences were just poetic and meaningful,” Willis says.

He later settled in Philadelphia and Camden and was a noteworthy abolitionist. He’s one of the many hidden figures with local ties in the book, something that gives Willis, who grew up in North Philadelphia, a lot of pride, she says. “We need to give this man a monument.”

Willis, department chair for photography and imaging at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, had noticed a dearth of images of Black servicemen from the era. For The Black Civil War Soldier, she pulled together photographs, letters, and diary entries to shed light on not only what Black servicemen were experiencing, but also what Black teachers, Black doctors, Black children, and other members of the community were. .

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“The letters humanize the experience of war and personalize it in a way that guided me to focus on families. The experience of mothers writing a letter to Abraham Lincoln to say, you know, ‘I’m worried about my son, please take care of him,’ ” Willis explains.

“Having the time to research this book,” Willis says, “it just proved that if people were educated [in] a sense about the history of Black people in this country, and that their monuments were preserved and placed in public spaces, that would really greatly enhance the knowledge about the important part, that Black people fought for their freedom.”

Willis, 73, a MacArthur Foundation fellow, spoke to The Inquirer about the new book, memory, and the ways that Black people sought freedom. This interview has been edited and condensed.

When I worked at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at the New York Public Library, I would find photographs in family collections.

Then 20 years later working again at the Smithsonian, still not enough information about [Black Civil War soldiers’] photographs and letters. So I thought that the personal memory was lost. And the public memory was lost. But I knew that individual collectors and individual family members held on to family stories about the Civil War.

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I didn’t know the story either. … And I thought it was really important to keep his story in this book.

To read his story. And to have to know that he visited a photographic studio to pose in his uniform, that we can see was a uniform that was given to him when he could not fight when he entered the war. But he worked as an assistant for the lieutenant in that time period. He was an older man in the war. He was born probably around 1796. But here he was the first person attacked, with names called, as he marched through Baltimore.

The respect that his captain and his lieutenants and all of the people in the troop, that they maintained his story, and protected, in a sense, his memory. And I think that’s really an important way to recognize his importance to the war.

It was hard. The fact that they could not make a choice of not fighting. But there’s one in here who decided that he was free and decided to fight alongside or stay [with his enslaver’s son.] They had a boyhood bond, that stayed connected. The loyal experiences that they had was the posed photograph.

I really thought it was important to keep the whole aspect of conflict … having to read their experiences, and not even reading between the lines, you see it clearly on the page, that these are people who were conflicted in terms of having to fight for the South when they were enslaved by these people.

Louis Agassiz and J.T. Zealy, they photographed some of the first known photographs of Black people in the 1850s. They were made to create an image of Black people who were not human. The images of Drana and Delia stripped, and their breasts exposed, so the body is still part of the sold Black body as labor. Not only the labor of reproductive labor, having children, but also the labor in the field.

We know that there were free Blacks who also assisted in the movement and hopeful freedom of Black people. And that’s where Frederick Douglass comes in, where he’s the most photographed man of the 19th century. And dress was important for him, that his wife, Anna Murray Douglass, made his clothes when he posed for those photographs. Clothes were, for him, identity formation.

And so that’s where I see why the dressed bodies were important. Because [in] the images that circulated, bodies were stripped of their clothing, men and women as they were on the auction block. They became objects. But the clothed body, we can see them as human beings.

That when we look at them today, and think about when they entered the studio, that they were sending a message for their future, that there was and will be a Black future for them. That they were not only dying on the grounds at that time.

[In this image with] the, quote, “contraband” — who were people who were in that state of limbo between enslaved and free — we see a pregnant woman in here. Her arm is looped around a woman who could be her mother. But we see generations in this image. We also see a woman who is possibly a nurse. The different roles that Black people play in their fight for freedom is depicted in this photograph.